Archive for August 2013

Sev­eral weeks ago, I was invited to speak to an audi­ence of IT and busi­ness lead­ers at Wal­mart about the Lan­guage of Dis­cov­ery. Every pre­sen­ta­tion is a feed­back oppor­tu­nity as much as a chance to broad­cast our lat­est think­ing (a tenet of what I call lean strat­egy prac­tice — musi­cians call it try­ing out new mate­r­ial), so I make a point to share evolv­ing ideas and syn­the­size what we’ve learned since the last instance of pub­lic dialog.

For the audi­ence at Wal­mart, as part of the broader fram­ing for the Age of Insight, I took the oppor­tu­nity to share find­ings from some of the recent research we’ve done on Data Sci­ence (that’s right, we’re study­ing data sci­ence). We’ve engaged con­sis­tently with data sci­ence prac­ti­tion­ers for sev­eral years now (some of the field’s lead­ers are alumni of Endeca), as part of our ongo­ing effort to under­stand the chang­ing nature of ana­lyt­i­cal and sense mak­ing activ­i­ties, the peo­ple under­tak­ing them, and the con­texts in which they take place. We’ve seen the dis­ci­pline emerge from an eso­teric spe­cialty into full main­stream vis­i­bil­ity for the busi­ness com­mu­nity. Inter­pret­ing what we’ve learned about data sci­ence through a struc­tural and his­toric per­spec­tive lead me to draw a broad par­al­lel between data sci­ence now and nat­ural phi­los­o­phy at its early stages of evolution.

We also shared some excit­ing new mod­els for enter­prise infor­ma­tion engage­ment; craft­ing sce­nar­ios using the lan­guage of dis­cov­ery to describe infor­ma­tion needs and activ­ity at the level of dis­cov­ery archi­tec­ture, IT port­fo­lio plan­ning, and knowl­edge man­age­ment (which cor­re­spond to UX, tech­nol­ogy, and busi­ness per­spec­tives as applied to larger scales and via busi­ness dia­log) — demon­strat­ing the ver­sa­til­ity of the lan­guage as a source of link­age across sep­a­rate disciplines.

But the pri­mary mes­sage I wanted to share is that dis­cov­ery is the most impor­tant orga­ni­za­tional capa­bil­ity for the era. More on this in fol­low up post­ings that focus on smaller chunks of the think­ing encap­su­lated in the full deck of slides.